


Play It A Different Way

by MaymayC



Category: Bandstand - Oberacker/Oberacker & Taylor
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/F, F/M, I'm Sorry, M/M, They're all bi, This is really sad guys, mostly?, overuse of commas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 18:09:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11491842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaymayC/pseuds/MaymayC
Summary: He flinches at the way she calls him 'kid', can still hear the echos of Michael shouting it across a field, whispering it across a foxhole.He falls in love anyway.





	Play It A Different Way

**Author's Note:**

> This is unbeta'd and I read it like, once, you're welcome. 
> 
> Title is from "This is Life" (from the show).

Maybe this is how it starts-

Julia looks so much like him, the way her eyes shine with emotion, only the light reflected in them is from Broadway marquees and skyscraper lights instead of explosions and the burning sun of the Pacific.  
He flinches at the way she calls him ‘kid’, can still hear the echoes of Michael shouting it across a field, whispering it across a foxhole.  
He falls in love anyway.

Or maybe-

He appears on her doorstep, desperate to leave, but her earnestness, her fierce determination make him stay. Julia is just how Michael described her- brave and loyal and tenacious to a fault. She is nothing like how Michael knew her. She’s guarded, her smiles are earned.

(Donny remembers this-

Michael’s easy smile, the way his hands looked wrapped around a gun, the way they fit together- lipshandshearts, like two edges of a puzzle meeting.)

No matter how it starts, the middle goes like this-

Donny is standing in a hotel hallway, staring at his guilt. When he asks to come inside, Julia lets him. He needs to tell her a story.

 

Donny remembers this-

He gets off the bus at Camp Wallace in the oppressive Texan heat. He is two days shy of nineteen and terrified and already missing his piano. A guy not much older than him claims the cot next to Donny’s. He looks like a propaganda poster come to life, with his broad shoulders, blond hair, and big grin. He unzips his duffle bag to reveal a mountain of books and a brown paper bag which her pulls out and offers to Donny.  
“My name’s Michael. Want a cookie?”

Donny spends the next month glued to Michael’s side. This is what he learns- Michael is funny and kind and beautiful and married. He reads every night and writes to his wife almost as often.  
This is what Donny learns on leave one day. Michael pulls Donny down an ally after Donny starts a bar fight over Frank Sinatra. They lean against the wall and Michael says “You’re something else kid” right before kissing him. The bricks leave bruises along Donny’s spine for weeks and when they ache at night he rolls over and watches Michael sleep.

Then they go to war.  
Now they steal kisses in foxholes and later, after they realize the men in their squad can’t be bothered (“too much paperwork” their sergeant says with a shrug), against palm trees.  
They fall asleep tangled together whenever they can, Donny’s head on Michael’s chest. (He’s never felt like that; the way he did as Michael’s heartbeat lulled him to sleep. He can’t sleep without it.)  
Once, on a march, Michael glances at the somber faces, at Donny’s empty gaze, and says “’My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…’” The other boys hoot and whistle as Donny elbows him fondly and says “I’m not your mistress.”  
(Later, Donny asks him about Julia, about after the war. Michael just smiles, less easy but just as wide and says “Don’t worry about it kid”) 

This is what Donny wishes he could forget-  
A hill, a grenade, the way Michael looked in the rain, all the words that stuck in his throat those four years and never escaped. They rattle around in his brain, haunt his fingers, stalk his dreams.

This is what Donny wants to tell Julia-  
How Michael’s hand fit in his, the way he set his jaw and narrowed his eyes when he was trying to recall a line of poetry, what his face looked like after their first kiss. His guilt freezes his tongue and blinds him with tears.  
This is what Donny tells Julia-  
“You should know something…”

Julia Adams is not stupid.  
When Michael Trojan invites her and Dorothy Holt on a double date with him and Jimmy Campbell, she opens her locker and ignores him until he catches on.  
“Oh! No, I mean youandDorothy on a date with meandJimmy.”  
She closes her locker slowly.  
The four of them spend every Friday night together for a year. Julia and Dorothy hold hands in the back rows of movie theaters. Jimmy and Michael hook their ankles together under restaurant tables.  
Then Jimmy graduates and Dorothy moves, but Julia and Michael keep going to movies and dinners and out for walks until one day they realize they’re dating.  
Julia loves him- the way he bites his nails as he reads, the way he can burn any food, the way he drums out rhythms absentmindedly all day.  
She marries him on a sunny spring day, a week after they graduate. Michael and her mother both cry at least twice. Julia smiles through the whole thing. 

Julia Trojan is not stupid. Her husband has always had a big heart.  
When Michael is drafted, she sits him down at their kitchen table.  
“If you fall in love, I understand,” she says.  
“I’ll tell you all about it if I do,” he says. “But I wouldn’t worry about it Jules.”  
His first letter home goes like this-  
“I met this kid, he’s got the biggest eyes you’ll ever see and his voice is almost as good as yours…”  
Michael never writes about the war. Instead, he fills his letters with this boy- his fights, his face, his fingers.  
Michael’s last letter home goes like this-  
“I’ve never seen anyone like him Jules, not except you. You’re two of a kind.”

After, Julia misses him like a piece of her soul.  
Sometimes, waking up in her childhood bedroom, she panics, worried she dreamed it all and she’s late for school. Those mornings she sits and counts the things she misses about him. How he smiled, how he danced, how he held her.  
The day after the war ends she goes downstairs, bakes his favorite cookies, and goes back to bed.  
Eventually she adjusts her course, sets her sights on living day to day. Maybe that’s the best she’ll ever do.

Of course, she never planned on Donny Novitski. 

When he appears on her doorstep she knows who he is immediately- not by his name, but by his eyes and hands and the slope of his shoulders. I know you, her heart says and she longs to hear his stories- he is the only person who had known Michael the way she had. She wants to dig into his memories and mine them for every spec of him they hold.  
She tries to tell him that she knows (“Michael mentioned you a lot in his letters”) but he just looks away.

Julia Trojan is not stupid. She knows that Michael was setting them up. It’s an insurance policy- the two loves of his life finding love again with each other.  
Because of course she falls in love with him.  
Donny is so different, yet so familiar. He never calls her ‘Jules’. He says every syllable of her name as if it’s his favorite. She loves how deeply he loves- music, his piano, the band. He cares so much, about chord progressions and solos and the boys.  
The band saves her really. She was alright before it and she probably would’ve stayed alright. But with these boys, whether wandering the streets of New York City or doing warm ups in the back room of a dive bar in Cleveland, she feels truly happy in a way she hasn’t since the war started. She loves the way Nick and Wayne bicker good-naturedly, when Davy teases and jokes, how Jimmy hooks his ankle around Johnny’s under the table when they’re out for drinks after a show.  
(Jimmy is a war older, changed by it, but that one action reassures Julia- deep down in their centers they’re still the same. She and Jimmy will always fall in love with lost boys.)

So when Donny asks her nervously if he can come in, looking as scared as she always imagined he did that first day in Texas, she lets him in. 

“Oh Donny,” she says when he finishes. “I already knew. You’re all he ever wrote about.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang with me on tumblr where I cry about Bandstand (@awitchorwhat).


End file.
